Roger
by teh liz
Summary: Roger is five. Then ten. Then eighteen. Then twenty three, twenty five, twenty six, and twenty seven. So how do you measure the life of a woman or a man?


Roger is five.

He watches his father play the guitar. Martin Davis plays, instrument resting on his knee while he sits on the couch and his wife Evelyn, Roger's mother, reads in a nearby armchair. Roger sits next to him, as close to his father as the guitar will let him get. He doesn't know what song he is playing, but it is his father playing, and that is enough for him. He asks his father if he can play. With the utmost solemnity, Martin puts the guitar pick in his son's small hand. "Run it along there," he says, pointing to the hole.

Roger clenches the small piece of white plastic and pulls it across the strings, strong and enthusiastic. The guitar comes alive with the music, and a smile spreads across the young boy's face as he watches the strings vibrate with sound. He does it again. He has found his first love.

He begs his father to teach him and let him play guitar. Martin laughs again, and says guitar is a difficult instrument, especially for one so young, but if he wanted to learn music, then he would learn music.

Two weeks later, Roger was taking piano lessons. He was in love.

The pretty boy front man…

Roger is ten.

It's been a long up and down battle, but after two years, the doctors have said there was nothing more they can do. The last two years have seen the Davis family to many different hospitals and medical centers, but the end result is inevitable. Over the last two years, Roger has watched his father get sicker and sicker as the cancer ate at him and the treatments tried and failed to defeat it, and now he would watch his father die.

He doesn't think anything hurts more than watching the man who once had endless energy be so tired, he can't even sit at the piano with Roger or sit up to play his guitar – but then, he has his good days, and he has his bad. Now Roger begs – he _has_ to learn guitar, and he has to learn it now, as much as he can, before his father is no longer there.

They work on it every day when Roger comes home from school, no matter what kind of a day it has been. Progress was slow but steady. Eventually, his fingers no longer hurt as he learns more chords. Tired and sick as he is, Martin smiles, the smile lighting his thin face, and Roger's heart soars.

In the spring, Roger's father dies. He sits in his room and plays the only song he knows – "Nowhere Man."

Time flies, time dies…

Roger is eighteen.

He barely manages to graduate high school, but he does it. While his classmates talk of going to UCLA, Columbia, University of Texas, and Loyola, he stays quiet. Even if he could go for music, he wouldn't. Music and academics never went together for him.

He and Jack were moving to New York. Starting a band. Going to get famous. That was the plan. He tells his mother this.

Evenlyn laughs a little. "Remember what I said about planning, Roger."

"Man plans, God laughs," he repeated, grinning a little.

God had to be entertained somehow.

One song to leave behind…

Roger is twenty-three.

He's almost twenty-four – _will _be twenty-four by the time they are done with their last set in this club. It'll certainly be past midnight then, if it isn't already. He isn't wearing a watch and there isn't a clock in sight. He continues to play his guitar, but fuck, there's a girl sitting at the bar making eyes at him. She's hot. Reddish-brown hair, it looks like, and when she smiles – oh, Christ. He's done for.

The band finished their set, and he casually makes his way across the floor. There are a couple compliments tossed his way by bar hoppers, and he nods curtly, his eyes on the girl, always.

He sidles up her, but not so close as to seem skeazy – he had seen that, and it inevitably ended badly. "Hi," he says, very smooth.

"Hi," she returns, her smile shy now. "I'm April. You guys were good up there."

God, she's beautiful. "I'm Roger. Can I buy you a drink?"

She agrees. At the end of the night, she hands him a napkin with her number.

In the eyes of a young girl…

Roger is twenty-five.

April was twenty-two, but now she's dead. The blood is gone from the side of the tub. There is still a stain on the floor; all the scrubbing in the world wouldn't get it out of the wood. Thanks to Mark's mother, however, there is a tasteful floral rug resting over the top of it. Which is fine. If he doesn't have to look at the stain, he doesn't have to remember.

He'll do anything to not remember. He cooks heroin any old place now. He ignores the expression on Mark's face, unreadable as it is, and does it, because he doesn't care. April's life has gone to waste and now he's going to waste his. A life for a life.

He overdoses. He wants to tell Mark not to bother calling an ambulance, because he wants to die. He wishes Mark would throw him into the street and let stray animals eat his body. He doesn't deserve to have people mourn him, bury him, cry for him, or care for him. When Mark decides for him that he does deserve it by picking up the phone and dialing 911, Roger gives in. He's barely breathing, what else is he supposed to do?

When he wakes up in the hospital, they ask him if he knew he was HIV positive. He doesn't answer, but hardly needs to with the Look he gives them.

Mark comes a bit later. "We've scraped together enough money for you to go to rehab," he says, a bit nervously, because he's not sure how Roger is going to react to this. He waits for it, and Roger merely shrugs. "You'll go? And you'll actually try to be cured?"

Roger would laugh, but he isn't in a laughing mood. Truthfully, he's angry. He wants to die, and doesn't think anyone should care if he does or not. "Why? Why do you care?"

Mark blinks, and his expression takes on a kicked puppy look to it. "Why do you have to ask?"

He looks down at the blanket, white as snow. He supposed that was his answer.

"Yeah, I'll go."

Then no need to endure anymore…

Roger is twenty-six.

He is back in the loft with Mark. He's finally out of rehab – just a week, but he still hasn't left the house. A lot changed while he was gone. Maureen's gone, which is just fine with Roger because her incense made him sick. The kicker – and the part that made Mark go, "Stoplaughingitisn'tfunny," when he told him, is that she left him for another woman. But that's really not all. Mark's changed too, even though Roger can't put his finger on it.

Roger's changed, too. He knows he has.

Once again left in the loft with only his thoughts for company, he idly plays the Fender guitar. Maybe he'd call Jack up. Get another band together. Write some new stuff. He hadn't written in a year. He hadn't cared to. It was already past a year when April had died. He'd never wanted drugs in rehab as much as he had wanted them that day. He would have taken anything to dull the pain and given anything to forget.

Now it's Christmas Eve. He's out, and he's clean, but what does he have left.

He stops playing.

There is a knock at the door.

One song to redeem this empty life…

Roger is twenty-seven.

Christmas Eve has come once again, and he dreads it. He dreads it because he knows that this time there will be no Mimi knocking on his door for anything, least of all to light her candle.

He looked. He _did._ He looked all over Manhattan and in Brooklyn. If he wasn't looking, he was writing. A song. For her. All for her. All _about _her, really, because she was all he could think about.

Fuck, he was in love.

The power blows out again, and so there will be no feature film by Mark Cohen for the night. Collins shows up with – shit, a fist full of cash. He's regaling them with the tale when they hear the cry that will make Roger's night so many times worse.

"MARK! ROGER! ANYONE, HELP!"

Mark runs over to the window and throws it open all the way. "Maureen?" he calls down.

"IT'S MIMI – I CAN'T GET HER UP THE STAIRS!"

Roger is frozen to the floor and Collins runs out the door. He can hear him dash down the stairs, probably taking several at a time, but it sounds so far away. He can feel his heartbeat in his ears. "_No_," he whispers. That meant she was… not finding her was better, he firmly believed that. Anonymity was better than watching it and being confronted with it. He'd always believed that.

Maureen bursts through, holding the door open for Collins, who carries Mimi in his arms. Tiny Mimi, always petite, now expounded by illness. Roger took her, breath catching in his throat. He could see her wrist sticking out of the arm of her jacket, and how thin… He laid her on the table, and looked vainly for the cordless phone, never on its cradle when it was needed.

He couldn't hear Maureen and Joanne and Mark, catching only a few words – _"freezing", "living", "street", "cold"_ – "We need some heat!" he cries, as if this weren't obvious. He runs and yanks the blankets off his bed, taking them back to the kitchen. He covers Mimi gently, tenderly, like she would break if he pulled them on any faster.

"I'm on hold!" Collins tells them, and the feeling in the room tenses tenfold.

"Would you light my candle?" she asks pitifully, looking right at him. The brown eyes seem to see right to the middle of him, where no one's ever been. Not even April was ever that close.

"Yes, we'll – oh _god._" This isn't happening to him. To her. To them. Isn't, isn't, isn't. "Find a candle," he tells whoever's listening.

Who knows where Mark finds this candle – Roger heard him digging around in the drawers in the kitchen, returning with a book of matches from CBGB's and a purple votive candle. Probably lavender or some shit like that, he doesn't check, lighting it quickly and kneeling down beside her.

He tries to apologize, she interrupts, he interrupts back. All is forgiven with just a look. She's just – god, even so sick, she's beautiful. "I love you," she tells him, and he feels her hand lose… something inside his. A spark. Fuck. No. If she was going to die right there on the kitchen table, then so be it, but he was not going to let her go without hearing the song.

He sings the song for her. The others are trivial, they do not matter, all there is in the world is him and his guitar and Mimi and her eyes and the song.

She has heard the song.

Her eyes, the ones that took him by surprise, close.

"Mimi…" _Please. No. Don't be dead._ She was so cold when they came in, there was no immediate difference to her skin, even though the steady rise and fall of the blankets has stopped.

Starts again. "I jumped over the moon!"

Dead people were not supposed to talk, what the _fuck _was going on here?

Mimi comes back. She tries to sit up. He tries to make her lay back down, but she's insistent. He sits behind her. She tells this tale, about meeting Angel, and Angel sending her back.

Roger doesn't know anything about afterlife, he isn't even sure he believed in God. But Mimi is here, now, and his, and things are going to be perfect and that's all that matters.

One blaze of glory.


End file.
